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From Where I Stand

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While people go on being killed in Iraq every day and more and more Taliban creep back into Afghanistan every month, and war threatens to engulf even more of the Middle East now, an issue brews in Japan that could change the geopolitical balance of the globe. But few Westerners are aware of it, and almost no one here is talking about it.

In the First World War, when diplomacy had ended and war was at full bore, when communication systems were archaic and innocent people were trapped on both sides of the line, we used carrier pigeons to shuttle messages from one side of a border to the other. This time, it seems all we have left to use if we want to know what’s happening on the other side are people. Common people.

Here's the basic problem with war: It's planned by politicians and fought by the rest of a country. At this point, over 90 percent of the victims of war, the United Nations reports and researchers confirm, are not soldiers. They are civilians -- and most of them women and children.